


The Price of Your Name

by TwoCatsTailoring



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Gen, Iris the daemonslayer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-16
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-05 12:02:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13387401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwoCatsTailoring/pseuds/TwoCatsTailoring
Summary: Iris earns her nickname, but there's a ery personal cost attached to it.





	The Price of Your Name

“I’m telling you it was epic, man! You shoulda seen her!”

 

The gossips around Lestallum were working overtime today and for once, it was getting on Iris’s nerves. That’s not to say that she normally reveled in it but it was just about the only way she could get solid news of her brother, Cor, or anyone in that small group of people who she knew from back home.

 

Home. What a disastrous concept that was. Maybe it was why, as the two people standing on the street below kept on talking, she walked back into the room at the Leville that felt more like home than her own room in House Amicitia ever had. House Amicitia was a lifetime ago now anyway, and she was not  the girl who’d left it anymore, not even able to grab her backpack in the chaos of the Treaty Signing Massacre. Maybe it was still sitting there in the hallway, half open. Or maybe it was only  ash on the ground. Like everything else. 

 

She didn’t know, and at this very moment couldn't muster the energy to care. As her mouth pulled down in a frown, the stitches in her lower lip tugged sharply making her wince. Not that they hadn’t just tried to find out - her and Cor. It’d been her idea and Cor had vetoed it, hard and fast. At 16, she would have taken that answer and been bitterly unhappy about it. But she wasn’t 16 anymore and she’d told him, with no fanfare, that if he wouldn’t help, she would simply go alone. 

 

She resented the fact that he had changed his mind. He had gone with her to the very gates of the city, and had been there when she swallowed her resentment when they could get no further, the daemons pouring out of the city like water out of a bucket. Overwhelmed, injured, and with no hope of anything but a hasty, messy, painful retreat back the way they came they had turned their backs on home.

 

Home? A laughable concept as far as she could tell.

 

Iris was no stranger to heartbreak but this was different than any other heartbreak she endured. When you lose a person, she supposed, or when you lost a childish daydream, there was at least something left behind to fix on to help. When she realized her dad was dead, there were pictures, there was Gladio, Monica was also there with plenty of things to do. And Noctis? Well,  he was just a crush really, no matter what her dad and his had thought about or planned and afterwards? When he’d disappeared? Again, there was the promise of him coming back - eventually. And then, there was so much to do with the refugees and the Glaives and everything. 

 

But now? There wasn’t much for her to do with the fact that she was, in truth, homeless. Her home, the memories of her youth (that sounded so stupid coming from a 19 year old but hadn’t she survived more in the past three and a half years than she had in the first sixteen? She didn’t feel how she thought a nineteen year old would feel, she felt like what she thought 50 or 60 might feel like.) all gone and out of reach. And she had no idea what to do with it at all. The broken arm meant there wasn’t any fighting she would be doing soon and the gossip on the streets had shushed to turn into open-mouthed and uncomfortable stares when she left the Leville. She had nothing.

 

Just her and these four walls. Six if she counted the jutting out part that housed the bathroom but why split hairs? Eight if she counted the partition that Aranea had put up to keep their weapons and armors safe and out of some of the humidity. The worst thing would be for the Stoss to get rusty or for Iris’s mace-handle to expand and crack. Yeah, that would be the worst thing, surely. Way worse than home being so close and so far at the same time. Way worse than the aching hollow spot that seemed to crack open in her throat. Worse than the sob that she muffled with her fist.

 

Worse than the stories that kept  going around on the streets of Lestallum about the Amicitia girl, what was her name? Iris? Such a pretty name for a sweet girl who had taken down three Gargantua at the gates of the Crown City after one of them had knocked out Cor the Immortal. He’s getting too old for this. Yeah, but with a Daemonslayer like Iris to take his place, did it matter?


End file.
